2008/7/3 Graham Carlyle wrote to testing-in-python mailing list:
> the framework looks pretty cool. I wonder why you didn't build on Fit
> though (& PyFIT or even Fitnesse) as it seems very close conceptually,
> any particular reason?
Robot Framework [1] actually has a quite long history even though it
has been available as open source only few weeks. It's originally
based on a prototype I made for my Master's Thesis [2] few years ago,
and back then FIT/Fitnesse wasn't as well-known as it is currently and
PyFIT probably wasn't even available. A bigger reason is that based on
my studies about data-driven and keyword-driven approaches I simply
found the pure keyword-driven technique advocated e.g. by Carl Nagle
of SAFSDEV [3] more flexible than the approach used in FIT where
different tables need different fixtures. The reason I didn't want to
use SAFSDEV directly was that they only had mplementation on top of
WinRunner. It only took few days to get the first prototype ready with
Python and I got Java support automatically via Jython. Pretty good
deal.
I'll probably write more about the history of Robot Framework to our
users mailing list after I'm back from my summer holiday. The holiday
is also the reason for a slightly late reply.
Cheers,
.peke
[1] http://robotframework.org
[2] http://eliga.fi/writings.html
[3] http://safsdev.sourceforge.net/